Consumer Goods: Customer Stories

Rome-based Birra Peroni the leading brewer of Italian premium lagers, wanted to improve coordination and collaboration of its iconic marketing campaigns and trade marketing activities in Italy. Previously, the company relied on spreadsheet software, but lacked the tools to track and analyse the results of promotions at their events. Working with two Microsoft Gold Certified Partners in Italy, Ecobyte Technology and Istante, Peroni migrated to Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 collaboration technology as the most cost-effective control environment for its marketing cycle planning. Planning, approval, reporting and analysis of a campaign or promotion, which used to take between one week and one month to produce, is now available in near real time. Peroni parent company SABMiller, one of the world leading brewers, is now considering extending the solution to the rest of the group.

Calçados Marte is a leading manufacturer of women’s footwear, with 2009 revenues expected to reach U.S.$165 million. The Brazilian company relies on technology to share data among its internal users and widely dispersed resellers. With just four people on its IT staff responsible for managing its IT infrastructure, Calçados Marte sought to create a more flexible, streamlined environment that could handle the company’s growth, raise the availability of its servers, and improve performance for all of its users. Using the Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise operating system with Hyper-V™ technology, and several Microsoft® System Center products, Calçados Marte expects to consolidate servers by nearly 40 percent, cut software update time by half and server provisioning time by two-thirds, and lower overall IT management needs by 30 percent—all while improving service levels and reducing costs.

As Business Imaging Solutions (BIS) Service Strategy Manager for Canon Australia, Charles Stephens makes customers a priority. Yet he had difficulty accessing sales data from the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to optimize service policies. After Canon Australia deployed a Microsoft business intelligence solution from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner ComOps, Stephens is using accurate, timely information to align his policies with corporate goals that focus on customer care as a key differentiator. Canon Australia is sharing product usage reports and actual service calls records with customers to strengthen relationships and drive brand loyalty.

Headquartered in Bowling Green, Ohio, CMC Group consists of four subsidiaries that provide specialized printing and packaging solutions for a range of industries. CMC Group oversees management of these interrelated companies, delivering shared IT and financial services. In 2001, CMC Group implemented Microsoft Dynamics® AX for comprehensive business management functionality and powerful manufacturing capabilities. Looking to capitalize on enhancements in the latest version of the software, the company worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Greenlight BTS to deploy Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 and Create!form from Bottomline Technologies for document process automation to 85 people across its four subsidiaries. Now, CMC Group benefits from improved productivity, increased efficiency, and a solution that supports continued growth and innovation.

Del Monte Foods, a U.S.-based producer of food and pet products, strives to improve collaboration among its global workforce, while protecting its intellectual property and IT assets. By upgrading to Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint, the company gains enhanced business control and improves IT management through real-time health monitoring.

Del Monte Foods is one of the largest producers and distributors of food and pet products in the United States. The company relies on Microsoft products and technologies to run its technology infrastructure and recently participated in an early adopter program for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Del Monte is developing a SharePoint Server 2010–based application that helps the Finance department automate manual business processes such as approval workflows, and helps it ensure compliance by improving reporting capabilities. Del Monte plans to deploy similar applications for streamlining business processes to other business units throughout the company. With implementations that require little or no custom coding, Del Monte anticipates development cost savings, continued efficiency gains, and better business insights and results enterprisewide.

Energizer Holdings, Inc., one of the world’s leading makers of consumer batteries and flashlights, wanted a Web site that would be as innovative as its products and that would enable brand managers to quickly add and update content, create stylish designs, collaborate, and provide a comprehensive search capability. Energizer migrated from a Web site based on a mix of older technologies to one based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Now, Energizer uses the site for more timely and effective promotion of new and existing products as well as other consumer offerings, and saves on agency fees spent to produce and post content. The company tracks the use of search to help it revise and expand content to better serve consumers. And it can reuse page layouts and code on related sites, which helps increase return on investment.

General Mills is a global producer of market-leading food brands such as Betty Crocker, Cheerios, Green Giant, and Nature Valley. Committed to using technology to expand the way that its products and services are used, General Mills worked with Microsoft and Razorfish to develop Betty Crocker Kitchen Assistant, a downloadable application that can improve the cooking process. Using the Windows 7 operating system, and Microsoft design and development tools, General Mills created an application that features high-resolution food images, step-by-step cooking instructions that can be viewed from a distance, and the ability to easily interact with recipe information using speech and touch. Through its new offering, General Mills extended the Betty Crocker brand into a new digital channel, delivering a rich, engaging consumer experience.

To accommodate sales growth of 125 percent in one year, clothing designer and distributor Head Gear needed to automate and streamline its warehouse operation. The company’s existing Activant Eclipse ERP system, however, lacked the functionality needed to take on new business requirements. For example, the system did not support EDI, which became a necessity as Head Gear penetrated new markets. To meet this need and others, the company deployed Microsoft Dynamics® NAV and add-ons for shipping and the fashion industry. Since then, Head Gear has automated operations and increased responsiveness to customers through EDI. The company has also driven significant improvements in productivity, resulting in a savings of more than U.S.$250,000 a year, and reduced its turnaround time for orders from three days to only one—all while handling a sales volume as large as $1 million a day.

Jelly Belly Candy Company has experienced rapid growth over the last decade, as the company expands into new geographies and product areas. The company installed an ERP system in 2007 and began work on a project for an accompanying customer relationship management system. However, after 18 months of work, Jelly Belly decided to abandon the project and look for a more stable system that would meet its core requirements more effectively. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Webfortis, Jelly Belly implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM in two-and-a-half months, meeting core requirements, such as integration with the ERP system and creating a single view of customer information across the company. Jelly Belly uses the solution to strengthen relationships with customers and has reduced customer churn by at least 34 percent and added U.S.$60,000 each month in sales.

Lifetime Products was founded as a manufacturer of portable basketball systems. Its offerings have expanded to include other residential playground equipment, folding tables and chairs, sheds, utility trailers, and outdoor furniture. The company’s 1,400 employees are located in the United States, Mexico, and China, and work with supply chain partners and customers around the globe. Lifetime employees depend heavily on messaging technologies to keep everyone connected. To strengthen its lines of communication, Lifetime recently deployed Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 with Unified Messaging. Employees not only receive their e-mail and voice mail in a single inbox, but also now get a text-transcription of voice-mail messages. The company expects the new capabilities to result in faster resolution of customer issues, better supply chain collaboration, and reduced IT and storage costs.

Lion Nathan is a major producer, marketer, and distributor of premium alcoholic beverages in Australia and New Zealand. E-mail is critical to Lion Nathan’s operations, including the processing of orders received from many retail stores and pubs. To help ensure high availability of e-mail messaging, Lion Nathan has deployed a pilot of Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010, as a part of the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program. Lion Nathan expects that messaging enhancements will reduce storage requirements, resulting in a savings of AU$90,000 (U.S.$75,000). With the new messaging environment, Lion Nathan will be able to provide better site resiliency with higher availability, along with capabilities for employees to better manage and prioritize their communications.

New Belgium Brewing began in a basement in Fort Collins, Colorado, inspired by a Belgian bike tour. After his first taste of Fat Tire Amber Ale, Sales Director Joe Menetre wanted to introduce more people to the company’s Belgian-style craft beers. Yet, he was hindered by poor access to sales data and inadequate communications with the field. New Belgium deployed a Microsoft® Web-based business intelligence solution to give employees access to customer data to devise better sales strategies and chase opportunities. Sales reps also use Microsoft unified communication and mobile technologies to stay connected to the head office.

Newell Rubbermaid wanted a common and cost-effective way to manage its more than 30 brand Web sites, while giving each of those sites the distinctive look and function that the brand required. Newell Rubbermaid turned to digital agency LBi Atlanta to replace open source and other technology with Microsoft®-based technology. The company expects to save U.S.$1.5 million in fees, capital depreciation, and other costs for content updates and platform maintenance over two years.

Based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Oughtred Coffee and Tea is a coffee roaster, distributor, and equipment service provider. Relying on a basic accounting package to manage operations, the company handled many processes outside the system, resulting in islands of data, data reentry, and a lack of business insight. To streamline operations and achieve the insight needed to strategically plan production and optimize its merchandising on retailers’ shelves, the company implemented Microsoft Dynamics NAV® 2009 and engaged Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner The RSC Group to drive the implementation by using the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology. After going live with core functionality in only four months, Oughtred Coffee and Tea has established the central data store needed for advanced decision making and expects to save 2,000 hours a year by reducing data reentry.

Podravka is one of the biggest food companies in southeastern Europe, with 6,500 employees and a wide variety of kitchen-staple products sold in 45 countries. Responding to customer tastes in so many markets and competing against global giants require that Podravka constantly tunes its offerings and reacts to changing tax and pricing environments. To meet business needs and contain mushrooming IT costs, Podravka deployed Windows Server® 2008 R2 Enterprise with Hyper-V™ technology and Microsoft® System Center data center solutions. By optimizing its core infrastructure, the IT staff can dynamically respond to business needs by deploying virtual machines in hours instead of weeks. Podravka will slash costs by U.S.$2 million over five years and has improved application availability, created a low-cost disaster-recovery facility, and reduced carbon emissions by 78 percent.

Radio Flyer, one of the oldest and most prestigious names in children’s toys, didn’t want to play around when it came to applying business intelligence (BI) to understanding current and future sales trends. So it rejected Oracle and SAP Business Objects solutions in favor of a Microsoft® solution that enables better decision making, requires less IT staff time for reporting, and has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than other options.

Samsung Electronics, a leading Korean company as well as a symbol of the IT industry, carried out an innovative project to strengthen its global Supply Chain Management (SCM) execution ability, gaining the industry’s interest. Samsung Electronics placed its emphasis on the business management scenario of predicting and preparing for future environmental changes and competitiveness, which is one of the survival strategies of an industry with an unpredictable future. The company is aggressively establishing the foundation for enhancing business management speed and efficiency-oriented business management innovations since early this year. In accordance with this type of scenario, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) Platform provided life to Samsung Electronics’ SCM system. Samsung Electronics decided to implement an action-oriented BI solution that enables on-demand changes of business management plans and reflects these adjustments. As such, it decided to deploy SQL Server 2008, which can satisfy all three major requirements of BI solution, including ‘performance and reliability’, ‘cube write-back’ and ‘user convenience’, and the company is thoroughly experiencing the benefits of this IT innovation. In the face of enterprise-wide application, it has completed application in only its video display business division, so it is still too early to mention any fixed quantity of benefits. However, with this system implementation, Samsung Electronics expects to increase its forecast accuracy for product demands by more than 20%.

Every day, the 15,000 information workers at Tyson Foods share information with one another to develop and market hundreds of products. To speed employee connections, strengthen business insight, and improve efficiency, Tyson deployed Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as its companywide collaboration platform. Using the software’s Enterprise Search capability, employees can find the people and data they need quickly, and employees have created more than 700 personal sites to share skills and experience. Users can access dashboards that expose SAP data through SharePoint sites to aid decision making, as well as business intelligence tools that integrate with Microsoft Office desktop programs for improved insights. In addition, the IT staff has been able to quickly create powerful, new Office Business Applications that are boosting productivity and savings across the company.